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CONTEMPORARY BRITISH ARTISTS: 
AMBROSE McEVOY 
General &ditor: ALBERT RUTHERSTON 











Esq 


f Claude Johnson, 


10n O 


In the possess 


) 


(1919 


PORTRAIT 


SELF- 





AMBROSE McEVOY 


NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


1924 


ACKNOWLEDGMENT 


‘THANKS are due to the National Gallery of British Art 
for the permission kindly given to reproduce The Ear- 
ring, the Portrait of a Young Man and the Study for 
“The Mirror” ; to the Imperial War Museum for per- 
mission to reproduce Lieut. R.D. Sandford,R.N.,V.C.; 
and to the Contemporary Art Society for La Reprise. 

Acknowledgment is gratefully offered also to those 
owners of Mr. McEvoy’s pictures and drawings who 
have courteously allowed photographs to be made of 
them for the purposes of this volume and to Mr. 
McEvoy himself for the valuable assistance he has 
given. 

All copyrights, except where acknowledged as 
otherwise, are strictly the property of the artist. 


Made and printed in Great Britain at 
The Mayflower Press, Plymouth. William Brendon & Son, Ltd. 


= 
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La] 
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. 


12. 
13° 
14. 
15. 
16. 
+7. 
18. 


19. 


20. 
21. 


is iieOb Plate S 


SELF-PoRTRAIT. (1919). In the possession of Claude Fohnson, Esq. 
Frontispiece. 

THE ENGRAVING. (1901). In the possession of S. D. Bles, Esq. 

THE THUNDERSTORM. (1901). In the possession of Mrs. Bishop. 

THE Book. (1903). In the possession of Sir Cyril Kendal Butler. 

THE ORCHARD. (1904). In the possession of Claude Fohnson, Esq. 

WINTER. (1905). Jn a private collection. 

DieprE. (1909). Jn the possession of Miss F. Spencer Edwards. 

INTERIOR. (1910). In the possession of Sir Cyril Kendal Butler. 

THE EAR-RING. (1911). National Gallery of British Art. 

SIANA. (1911). Jn the possession of the Hon. Cecil Baring. 

La REPRISE. (1912). In the possession of the Contemporary Art Society: 


PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG Man (W. Jowitrt, Esq., K.C., M.P.). (1912). 
National Gallery of British Art. 


La BasqualisE. (1913). Jn the possession of Mrs. McFadden, Philadelpa. 
MapaME. (1914). Musée du Luxembourg. 

VIRGINIA GRAHAM. (1915). Jn the possession of Captain Harry Graham. 
Tue Artist’s MOTHER. (1915). In the possession of the Artist. 

Tue Music Room. (1915). In the possession of T. Lowinsky, Esq. 

Mrs. Cuartes McEvoy. (1915). In the possession of the Artist. 

LorpD D’ABERNON. (1916). Jn the possession of Lord D’ Abernon. 


BLUE AND GOLD. (Mrs. CLAUDE JOHNSON). (1916). Jn the possession of 
Claude Fohnson, Esq. 


CLAUDE JOHNSON, Esq. (1917). In the possession of Claude Fohnson, Esq. 
THE MIDINETTE. (1917). In the possession of Claude fohnson, Esq. 


22. 


23. 
24. 
2, 
26. 
27. 
28. 
29. 
30. 


ar. 
32. 
33- 
34. 


LIST OPSPEATES 


MaDAME DE GANDARILLAS AND CHILDREN. (1918). In the possession of 
Madame de Gandarillas. 


LrzuT. R. D. Sanprorp, R.N., V.C. (1918). The Imperial War Museum. 
THE Rr. Hon. AuGustIne BirreLy. (1918). In a private collection. 
Miss GREEN. (1920). In the possession of Charles Romer Williams, Esq. 
Mrs. JOHN CARPENTER. (1920). In a private collection. 

By THE RIVER. (1922). In the possession of the Artist. 

STuDY FoR “ THE Mirror.” (1911). National Gallery of British Art. 
STupy For “THE Dancers.”” (1913). In a private collection. 


STUDY FoR “ MyrtLe.” (1913). In the possession of Miss F. Spencer 
Edwards. 


STupy. (1914). In the possession of E. F. Hesslein, E'sq., New York. 
PERIMAY. (1914). In the possession of George Plank, Esq. 

THE ArTIsT’s WIFE. (1915). In the possession of Claude Johnson, Esq. 
ZITA, (1923). In the possession of E. Poulter, Esq. 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


F it be true that “le style c’est l’homme,’’ we may hope 
to learn something of Ambrose McEvoy from a sym- 
pathetic study of his work. Our business is, in any case, 

with his work rather than with the man; and such brief 
biographical notes as may follow are given with a view to 
throwing light on the artistic personality embodied and 
revealed in his painting. McEvoy is essentially a stylist ; but 
not for that reason an esthetic doctrinaire. He is a stylist 
because he has an exceedingly delicate zsthetic sensibility, 
and a beautifully trained hand ; so that even his improvisations 
have an exquisite “ touch.”’ He uses the pointed and broad 
“ pencil’ with the happy love of the surgeon for his finely 
ground and tempered instruments. His drawings and canvases 
are thus instinct with vivid gesture, and there is something 
recognizable about the surface quality of every inch of his 


6 


work. He is no “ expressionist”; but so responsive is his 
hand to the nice perceptions of his eye and mind that there is 
a subjective personality in his work which is rare indeed in a 
painter of fashionable portraits. Wherein the charm of that 
personality lies we may look to learn rather from an appre- 


9 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


ciative study of his drawings and pictures than from an 
intimate knowledge of his life’s history. 

It does, however, enlighten us a little to know that McEvoy 
is a West-countryman of Celtic extraction, whose father was 
a soldier of romantic fortune, a man of strange and distin- 
guished experience, and a friend of Whistler, with whom he 
joined in encouraging young McEvoy’s ambition to become a 
painter. The boy had thus to face none of the accustomed 
parental opposition to the artistic career ; and at the delight- 
fully early age of fifteen found himself, just on the eve of its 
greatest epoch, a student at the Slade School in London. 
This very early start was entirely in accordance with the 
recommendation of the present Slade Professor ; and certainly 
the boy apprentice may hope to avoid the ineffectual diffidence 
and premature disillusion of a more advanced general educa- 
tion. Be that as it may, McEvoy was happy at the Slade, and 
did not rebel against the exacting Legros tradition and the con- 
servative security of Professor Brown. As for that intellectual 
capacity which is needed for the ‘‘ fundamental brainwork ” 
which Rossetti posited as necessary for the production of great 
painting, McEvoy never lacked a good brain and means and 
inclination to exercise it by reading, talking and appreciating 
the infinite variety of nature and humanity. At the Slade he 


fell in with that first essential to the rich fulfilment of a subtle 
IO 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


personality, good congenial friendship. Augustus John was 
the very companion for which McEvoy might have sought the 
world over. ‘The two young men were like enough to enjoy a 
profound sympathy and community of enthusiasm and am- 
bition, and unlike enough to fertilize each other’s craft and 
imagination. And the pace that John’s magnificent youthful 
draughtsmanship set was well maintained by Orpen, Edna 
Waugh, and Albert Rutherston. The air was big with present 
endeavour and achievement to come. So McEvoy worked 
hard at school for three years, touring the painted counties 
with John and a donkey in holiday time, and humbly copying 
Titian and Watteau in the National Gallery and in the Soane 
Museum ; learning every day to love the work of the old 
masters more and more, and to paint, not like them, but with 
the same spirit of ardour and endurance. 

His ambition was not to set the Thames on fire, but rather 
to do first-rate work of a very unobtrusive kind. From the 
outset the quietest of facts appealed to him as subjects ; dim 
interiors, quietly lit, quietly arranged, quietly peopled ; peace, 
and the harmony of remembered twilight; dim _ pensive 
symphonies of rest, in which colours and tones reflect the 
secure, unadventurous mood of the young painter. Or say 
that, hitherto, his adventures are in the esthetic world alone ; 


that his wrestling and stress are with tones and qualities of 


II 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


surface, and the intense difficulties of drawing and com- 
position which fairly tire out even the most facile draughtsman 
and composer. For the rest he was already, as he is still to-day, 
painting “moods’’; painting his own reactions to things and 
people ; deeply moved by the dim security of Victorian 
withdrawing-rooms and the dreamy sweetness of Victorian 
maidens ; an unashamed romantic, blind to the humanity of 
women, remotely charmed, with the uncomprehending chivalry 
of a schoolboy. Of such a mood The Engraving and The Book 
may serve as examples. The Thunderstorm, painted in the 
same year as The Engraving, is something of a sport in our 
painter’s e@uvre. The design and handling are quiet enough ; 
but the mood is dramatic, and it is the intensity of a moment 
that is recorded. Alone, too, among his works this picture 
is anecdotal in interest; though that interest did not pre- 
dominate in the artist’s mind. The point is admirably made, 
and the thoroughness of the painting assures achievement. 
But the work is not typical of the painter’s attitude to people 
or to Nature ; and the vivid flash illuminating the drenched 
trees and sky and grass are as unique as the strained momentary 
gesture of the still romantic, still Victorian lady. For the 
rest, in these early years Nature was to McEvoy a thing of 
gentle moods for the composer to experiment with. It is 


characteristic of the painter that he has chosen from this 
I2 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


period rather his unfamiliar landscapes than the interiors for 
which he was already in 1905 becoming well known. This 
and the previous year are represented by Winter and The 
Orchard. In the latter the motive seems almost entirely 
esthetic ; the forms and light and shade being treated with 
the complete freedom of a Watteau or a late Corot or Gains- 
borough landscape. The Orchard composes like one of those 


¢ 


impressions of Claudian “‘ arrangements ’’’ which figure on 


the walls of our artist’s own early interiors. And the surface 
y 


¢ b 


of the paint is lovingly worked into “ qualities’ which are 
the invention of the painter and no reflection or counter- 
part at all of the things he saw. After this brilliant essay in 
pure zsthetic Winter seems curiously reactionary. One is 
reminded of Rubens’ compelling chalk drawing of a winter 
landscape, or Turner’s astonishing Frosty Morning ; so little 
artifice, so little comment or positive creation is there in this 
modest record of observed fact. And yet it is a mood recorded, 
and not the frozen face of Nature. It is, indeed, in all three 
of these Winter masterpieces as if the face of Nature were, 
just precisely, while it lasted, the mood of the observer, empty 
of all significance, as is Hardy’s Wessex landscape, but for 
the hearts that beat in tune or out of tune with it. It is no 
realist’s Winter, but as human a document as that brown field 
and that white sky on and under which crawled Tess and her 


x3 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


blowzy companion. No wonder so personal an impression is 
dear to the artist. 

It was to be expected that Constable and the French 
impressionists would, sooner or later, have their influence on 
our painter. He could hardly have spent holidays in France 
with Walter Sickert without coming under the spell of these 
latter. So we have a Dieppe, dated 1go9, full of the lively 
illumination, the accurate tonality, the vibrant air, the rapid 
careless touch of the outdoor Frenchmen. But the first move- 
ment ends with a restatement and consummation of the 
earlier theme ; an infinitely quiet studio “‘ interior,” in which 
for the last time we note that remote detachment which gives 
his early work, for all its moodiness, an oddly impersonal air ; 
serene, dispassionate, but oh! how deliberately elaborate in 
colour, line, light, and quality. 

Thereafter, about 1911, the key begins to modulate ; not 
suddenly, but through long tentative passages. ‘The beat 
quickens ; developments are foreshadowed ; a primary artistic 
personality is emerging. ‘The pure idea is labouring to the 
birth ; and in three years’ time McEvoy’s essential self is to 
take wing ; to reach the zenith of its charming flight, perhaps, 
but two years later, in 1915, in that incredibly lovely portrait 
of Mrs. Charles McEvoy (his brother’s wife), sometimes called 
Silver and Grey, which need not fear to hang beside the best - 
14 


AMBROSE McEVOY 
of the English eighteenth century, beside the best of English 


Gainsborough. But the modulation was through an alien 
key or so. The Ear-ring, with its odd mixture of accurately 
focussed vision on the further elements, and rough quality 
in the foreground, already strikes a somewhat exotic note ; 
and La Basquaise (1913) and the drawing of the next year, 
Pertmay, seem to threaten, or promise, our painter’s turning 
sharply aside to follow John in his delight in queer types 
queerly handled. ‘This picture is the first important work in 
which, it appears, McEvoy thought that the sitter was subject 
enough for his portrait. The strong, whimsical, black design 
leans memorably across a plain gradated background. Within 
the design, perhaps the most forceful of his invention, the 
details are summarily treated, and the pale bony face tells 
with a disquieting insistence. Just for once McEvoy has 
struck a bizarre, an almost macabre, Goyaesque note. But the 
next year he “arrives”? with Madame (the artist’s wife) on a 
gay, brilliant cadenza of witty comment, sparkling gesture, 
and wilful oddity of lighting. We may note that no less than 
five works from the year 1915 have been selected for illustra- 
tion in this little volume. ‘Their range is wide and their 
various achievement secure. In this momentous year McEvoy 
hung in the balance between the subjective and the objective. 


Thenceforward, in his painting of women at any rate, style 
B os 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


was to take charge, matter to yield to manner, and the marriage 
between representation and invention to fade into a quiet 
dissolution. In the meantime the union holds: the fusion 
of the two interests is nearly complete. 

If Gainsborough and Reynolds have nothing more honestly 
charming to show than Mrs. Charles McEvoy, nothing more 
finely felt, more happily handled, Whistler, in his Miss Alexander, 
made hardly a more vital rendering of the quaint idiosyncrasy 
of precocious girlhood than Virginia Graham. The liveliness 
of this compact little figure, set in a staid nineteenth-century 
home, seems an amused savouring of the comedy of the modern 
young woman bred of a generation to which she must be per- 
petually shocking. As if she did not, bright impudent soul, 
see the folly alike of silk jackets, fluffy skirts and family furni- 
ture, and thereat shake the tousled mane on her erect, positive 
little head! With the portrait of The Artist’s Mother we are 
in Rembrandt’s world. Satire, romance, sentiment, comedy, 
give way to the exclusive interest of character patiently 
elaborated. You can look, as with Rembrandt’s old lady at 
Trafalgar Square, at nothing but the intense old face, and 
perhaps at last at the hands. There is no attempt in such 
work to achieve beauty of texture or surface. This hammering 
out of pure character, to the neglect of all calligraphy, all 


dexterity, and every kind of zsthetic motive, can in modern 
16 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


work only be paralleled in Mr. Wilson Steer’s recent portraits. 
Quite complementary to this is the almost wholly esthetic 
Music Room, as different from the Portrait of his Mother as 
is Steer’s Sketch of Dover Harbour from his self-portrait. It 
is not, like the earlier interiors, the reflection of a mood, but 
rather an impression of light, air and surface. To this 
same year, 1915, belongs the exquisite drawing of The Artist’s 
Wife, in which that fine blend of delicate line and bold mass, 
which is perhaps our painter’s happiest method, reaches its 
full flavour. In drawings such as this the sensitive precision, 
the nervous relishing of actual form and potential formula 
which underlie all McEvoy’s work, but are less noticeable in 
his painting than in his drawings, give a quality which delights 
the intimate eye, while the broad tonality and seemingly 
careless design stimulate and satisfy the more casual distant 
glance. ‘The combination has occasionally been tried in 
France and England, but amounts in McEvoy’s hands to 
something of an invention in portrait method. 

We are dealing now with an artistic personality which has, 
without any shadow of doubt, “‘ arrived.”” And if the world 
has acclaimed McEvoy’s arrival as that of a “‘ society ” portrait 
painter, it is an intriguing comment on the world’s estimate 
to note that the painter himself has agreed to be represented 
by not so much as one of the portraits of women of the kind 

17 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


on which his reputation is largely based. Nearly of this kind, 
however, is our No. 19, the physical type of which, the dress, 
the pose, the lighting, might be called, in the best sense of the 


+) 


term, “ fashionable.” But it is not for nothing that the artist 
calls this study,—at first sight a study of high breeding and 
secure taste,—by the painter’s title Blue and Gold. ‘The 
tribute to Whistlerian nomenclature may be taken as bearing 
witness to his preoccupation with esthetic values, to his 
indifference to the merely modish. But if he wishes to stress 
this aspect of his work, it is not therefore the only aspect ; 
and we shall hope to suggest how fittingly, how inevitably 
and in spite of himself, our painter was to become par excellence 
the fashionable painter of the leaders, not the followers of 
fashion. 

I remember meeting McEvoy in the second year of the 
War in a drawing-room, the friendly brilliance of which must 
already to those who recall it seem to belong to the irrecover- 
able past. It was peopled chiefly with young men and young 
women ; young men who, called from many intense peaceful 
interests, had flung their brains and good humour, their 
ideals and varied gifts, into the one business of war ; women 
who had had every chance in life and who seemed to have 
risen magnificently to their opportunities ; bred and trained 


to a nicety of limb and movement that might honour a race- 
18 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


horse, and of a taste and tact which could make of an idle 
evening something exquisitely worth while, in spite of those 
ugly realities in which all were taking their heavy part. Here 
was a society as delicately sensitive to the “‘ mere ”’ refinements 
as any vapid beau-led Bath or Tunbridge ; but wearing this 
fine flower of nice perception, as its women wore their clothes 
and their beauty, as the merest decent tribute to the infinite 
dignities, the infinite capacities of an aristocracy of friends: 
an aristocracy in which “ conversation,’’—the rich interchange 
of quick, well-stored minds, taking oh ! so much for granted,— 
was a real and relished possibility. It turned out precisely as 
it should that McEvoy should be attached in France to that 
uniquely gallant and unfortunate Royal Naval Division which, 
to those who knew it intimately, reflected or expressed with a 
curious felicity the strange, high-minded, dazzling personality 
of its creator. Poets, scholars, painters, writers, men of 
boundless promise in the fields of peaceful achievement, and 
with them veterans of sea and land and the political lists ; here 
was a charming, ironic company, in which Sir Philip Sidney, 
or Sir John Falstaff, might have found themselves equally 
at home. Now such a society it was McEvoy’s manifest destiny, 
in spite of his dim interiors, his pale landscapes and pensive 
ladies, to paint. We think of the society painter as a man of 
commanding presence, with the broad waistcoats and eyeglass 

19 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


ribbons of assured success. But then we think of “ society ” 
as the slave of, not the creator of fashion; as gross, stupid, 
automatic ; as inspired by (if inspired at all), and not as 
inspiring its dancers, preachers, painters, mimics, music- 
makers. Perhaps the generality of society has always been, 
must still be so. But fresh vital thought and imagination, nay 
the nicest of perceptions, the most pregnant of ironies, the 
highest of unspoken ideals, need not forever go along with 
a low-heeled dowdiness, and it was our painter’s fortune 
to fall in with and delight in a company of fine spirits as 
gay, as highly polished, as brilliantly mondaine as the most 
feather-headed of French or Viennese courts or English 
eighteenth-century watering-places ; a company which had 
assuredly a right to find an interpreter and reflector,—a 
greater right than had Bath to the youth and maturity of 
Gainsborough. 

It was natural and necessary that McEvoy, during the War 
at any rate, should take to painting men. His instinctive 
interests being primarily zsthetic, hardly at all in affairs, it is 
quite to be expected that he should “‘ make more ” of women 
than of men. It would be something of a tour-de-force to 
undertake nowadays a “‘ symphonic arrangement” of a portrait 
of a man ; though of course the Brescians, the Venetians, the 


French, and the English have often done such a thing. Like- 
20 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


ness, or at any rate a vivid interpretation of character, is what 
we want of male portraiture to-day in England ; and, though 
McEvoy was not in the least indisposed to satisfy this pre- 
dilection, he was not so perfectly equipped to do so as he was 
to give us what most of us want in paintings of women. At 
all events he was glad to have the fine romantic face and figure 
of Lord D’Abernon to exploit in a frankly Latin manner. Like 
Watts, or Titian, or Tennyson, the living man himself was, 
the sheer physical presence of him, a thing of design, of style, 
of vivid form, which went out handsomely more than half- 
way to meet and comfort the painter. In more than one of 
his portraits of sailors and winners of the Victoria Cross 
McEvoy betrays a patent gratitude to the appropriate “ pictur- 
esqueness ”’ of his sitter, to that obliging sense of style and 
type which Nature occasionally indulges, introducing just 
what the public longs for and expects in a Wellington, a Hinden- 
burg, a Beatty, after so exposing her indifference to, her 
wanton neglect of formal fitness in modelling a Wolfe or a 
Jellicoe. But, if he could not make great rhetoric of those of 
his naval and military sitters who were not cast in the more 
heroic mould, portraits such as Lieutenant Sandford, R.N.,V.C., 
show. once for all that McEvoy’s temperament and technique 
equip him well enough, on occasion at any rate, to carry 


through to its arduous conclusion a close objective research 


21 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


into the bare bones of character. Before this remarkable 
record, the strength, the thoroughness, the intensity, the 
impersonal simplicity of which recall Velasquez, the compel- 
ling subtlety Goya—Goya in his incredible Dr. Pereal—one - 
may well ask oneself, “ Do I, ought I nowadays to ask any- 
thing else at all of male portraiture than just what I am given 
here?” Beside it the oil-sketch of The Rt. Hon. Augustine 
Birrell, painted the same year, is a slight, if a happy, impres- 
sion. The painted quality of this pleasing note thrusts itself 
a little too insistently on the attention ; and if it were not for 
the comprehended truth which informs the features of the 
delightful old man we might mourn that the neglect of 
esthetic significance has not achieved a more poignant 
characterization. 

How much more, on the average, our painter could, in IQI7, 
make of women than of men is suggested by comparing his 
disturbing Midinette with Claude Fohnson, Esq. This latter 
is a thing of fine bold style, and as straightforward a study 
of character as you could wish, with a notable “ English ” 
air in the fresh lighting and ironic understatement. It carries 
rather more than less than its face value; it has an honesty 
which we might call pellucid. But the Midinette is a crea- 
tion of agitating suggestion, a thing to trouble and delight 


the imagination, as might a sudden distant night-view of 
22 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


Paris or London. Once again some stray delicious creature 
has provoked in our painter a mood of the subtlest formal 
invention. Deeply intrigued by the April freshness, the 
tender sparkle of this pretty maid, he has played with the 
unabashed tilt of her nose, the smooth broad cheek, the 
exquisitely rounded chin, the dewy softness of eye and lip, 
even with the rich weight of her rough coat, with a frank 
delight in the charming young person. 

There is little doubt that in recording his delicate reactions 
to such phenomena as these McEvoy will live in the future, 
as Romney has lived, mainly by passing on to later generations 
his nice responsiveness to feminine grace. Of the creative 
felicity which may result from such excitements a lovely oil 
painting of this same year, 1917, of Lady Wimborne—not, 
alas ! illustrated here—might be cited as an entrancing example. 
It may be supposed that the artist would not object to the 
surmise that this conception may owe something to Romney. 
It is a harmony of colour, light, line, and quality designed 
entirely to please. The displayed charms of this roguish 
beauty are deliberately planned to intrigue and provoke the 
more by the lack of repose of both expression and gesture. 
The dimpled, bare-shouldered nymph, with sidelong, smiling 
glance—lit, as the painter has latterly chosen to light his ladies, 
from below the eye-level—hurries, in sweet disarray of hair 

23 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


and dress, across the vision. In a flash she will be gone, a 
type of the fleeting elusion, the irresponsibility of fair women. 

To find another work of such entire loveliness as this we 
must go back to the 1914 drawing of the head and shoulders. 
of a girl; a study more staid, more sober, more static than 
Lady Wimborne, but akin to it in sheer adorable statement. 
This must surely be one of the prettiest drawings ever done ; 
as near perfection of style and perfection of fact as such things 
can be. ‘The delight in pure form is worthy of an early Dorian 
or Celt ; the calligraphy of an early Chinaman ; the humanity 
of an Englishman ; the illumination of a Frenchman. It is 
before drawings of this calibre that one is ready to be convinced 
of the superior expressiveness of line and wash to all other 
graphic media; and though it was done nearly ten years 
ago it is with this thing of perfect taste before us that we should 
wish to take a measure of McEvoy’s peculiar genius. 

Before, however, we embark on that difficult journey we 
may look a little closer at his technical methods, at the way in 
which his taste “‘ gets through.” Since, moreover, much of 
his energy has gone to the invention and perfection of ways of 
handling paint, any examination of his technique should throw 
some light on the problem of what exactly is his personal 
contribution to the sum of fine painting. A glance at our 
illustrations will suggest at once how varied has been the 
24 


} 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


direction of his experiments. Indeed, from these pictures and 
drawings, we might suppose that McEvoy was singularly free 
from the tyranny of formula. And yet that would, it may be 
hazarded, hardly be the view of him that most of us, who have 
never troubled to make a close study of him, have carried away 
from a casual memory of his exhibited work. We remember 
two phases in which formula seems, in his portraits, half the 
battle. The more important of these is perhaps that manner 
of line and wash drawing to which reference has already been 
made. Drawings of this kind were, we may suppose, originally 


made as ‘“ 


studies ”» for more laboured paintings in oil. A 
good instance of such a study—for The Mirror—is our No. 28 
of the year 1911. But already at this date the method had 
an independent value; and line and wash portrait drawing 
was to become the first manner by which McEvoy was to 
establish a wide reputation. In these drawings the inter- 
pretation of form is entirely distinct from the interpretation of 
light and mass. The one is suggested by a rapid, but searching 
line, got with a sharp pencil point; the other by a series of 
opalescent or dusky water-colour washes, reminiscent of the 
plain and smoked varieties of mother-of-pearl. ‘These washes 
appear to be abstract symphonies, or rather perhaps emana- 
tions, auras of the subjects: with little justification in the 
concrete fact beyond some degree of truth of projected shadow. 
a5 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


Some uninstructed exception has been taken to the method’s 
merciless treatment of the paper, and certainly McEvoy does 
not scruple to worry the surface by handsome scrubbing. 
The iridescent tones seem to have been put on haphazard, 
and rubbed boldly out here and there until a composition, 
a harmony, a setting took shape which struck our painter’s 
eye as—well, “ eyable.”” From this process the delicate, firm 
drawing of features and hands emerges with a nervous em- 
phasis, and the worn, faded texture of the setting serves but 
to flatter our inattentive eye, as secondary matter deliberately 
out of focus. Apart from this tendency to work the surface 
into a kind of light and shade and colour that please his eye 
and an almost over-sensitive reticence in the statement of 
character, the method is of course akin to Claude’s and Rem- 
brandt’s portentous scribbles, for the clean definition of their 
linear forms and the apparent haphazard of their washed tones. 

Of the other formula we have no good instance among our 
plates. It is a formula chiefly of lighting. McEvoy was not 
the first artist to be attracted by the grateful effect on the 
face of illumination from below, an effect which in its extreme 
form has long delighted the devotees of the stage-play and the 
ballet. Applied with a delicate tact and justified by the low- 
placed lighting by candle or electric lamp of modern drawing- 


rooms and dining-tables, this “‘ footlight ” formula has served 
26 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


him well to suggest the somewhat artificial milieu in which 
many of his sitters seem most appropriately set. It has often 
gone along with an almost slovenly assurance in the handling 
of draperies and backgrounds, which, but for their intrinsic 
gaiety or subtlety of colour, might have appeared too shallow, 
too altogether evanescent. But if in all but his best work 
McEvoy has caused his well-wishers a certain anxiety lest he 
should be content to follow the facilis descensus, the primrose 
path that opens so alluringly to the successful painter of 
women, they are reassured by a conviction of his artistic 
integrity, his fundamental indifference to everything but the 
values and requirements of his esthetic conscience. In this 
conscience there is nothing common or mean; and that he 
should ever go the way of Millais or Greuze is surely unthink- 
able. He has capitulated to the world no more and with no less 
reason than Gainsborough, who sometimes longed to leave 
‘the face way”’ and go back altogether to landscape. And 
though with such men in such circumstances it is not to be 
looked for that their best work should be done after they are 
thirty, we may be certain that, with so exquisite a taste, if 
their right hand forget its cunning, they will cease to paint 
at all. 

For the rest, in painting as in drawing, McEvoy is not too 


proud to follow the old vision and distinguish form from light 
27 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


and colour. He is even so old-fashioned as to model his more 
important forms in a first painting of neutral monochrome. 
It is a lesson he learnt at school, and relearnt from the greatest 
masters of Italy, Flanders and Spain. Dare we suggest that 
just in so far as he holds fast to this quaint old anchor his 
technique is more securely founded and his achievement more 
lasting than, shall we say, Renoir’s ? With such a basis the 
most wayward, whimsical painter may hope to avoid getting 
into a real “mess”; the eternal appeal of which, however 
expressive, however vital, however tasteful, however significant, 
can hardly fail, in the long run, to waver and collapse. 

We chose to take McEvoy’s measure with the 1914 drawing 


b) 


of a girl before us; “a thing,” we said, ‘‘ of perfect taste.” 
Is that, after all, the long and short of McEvoy’s secret? 
Other painters—Jan van Eyck, Raphael, ver Meer—have 
achieved other modes of perfection—perfections of hand and 
eye, as Rubens was perfect draughtsman. But perfect taste ? 
Is even the conception, perhaps, a modern one? Or should 
we concede as much to Raphael or Vandyck? What is this 
strange quality which claims for the surface appearance of 
things an infinity of value ;_ to which it is matter of life and 
death that a line should run just so and a colour be neither, by 
a minute degree, warmer nor colder? The stock epithet of 


taste is unerring ; it well suggests the serene assurance of the 
28 


AMBROSE McEVOY 


man of taste. We all know him; the man whose advice we 
should wish to take and fear to neglect in any matter of esthetic 
choice ; no scholar, perhaps, or skilled practitioner of the arts, 
but one whose eye reacts at once and with an absolute pre- 
cision to the subtlest niceties of pure or expressive form. 
When such a man is also a creative artist, his art will not be 
challenged as lacking in grandeur or sublimity, in poetry or 
even truth. The painter himself is our arbiter elegantiarum, 
and we may consider ourselves lucky if we dimly perceive one- 
hundredth of his fine-wrought delicacies. His touch is god- 
like ; out of the fire and gossamer of colour and line he can 
weave beauties which need not be justified by their content, 
forms which may be divinely insignificant. What he sees are 
the things eternally worth seeing ; you must go to the flowers, 
the clouds, the waves to match his faultless rhythms, his pure 
fantasies. Untouched by theory or faction, trusting his eye, 
practising untiringly his hand, he will enrich the world with 
inventions, born of his taste, and patiently wrought in the 
image of God. 
R.M.Y.G. 


29 





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the possession of S. D. Bles, Esq. 


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THE ENGRAVING 


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Prare 2, THE THUNDERSTORM. (1901). 
Oil. Inthe possession of Mrs. Bishop. 








PLATE 3. THE BOOK. (1903). Oil. Inthe possession of Sir Cyril Kendal Butler. 





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Pirate 7. INTERIOR. (1910). Oil. Inthe possession of Sir Cyril Kendal Butler. 








PLATE 8. THE EAR-RING. (191 I). Oi¢l. National Gallery of British Art. 





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PLATE 11. PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN (W. Jowirt, -Esq., K.c., M.P.). (1912). 
Oil. National Gallery of British Art. 








Pirate 12. LA BASOQUAISE. (1913). Oil. In the possession of Mrs. McFadden, Philadelphia. 





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PLaTE 14. VIRGINIA GRAHAM. (1915). Oil. Inthe possession of Capt. Harry Graham. 





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PLATE 17. MRS. CHARLES McEVOY. (1915). Oil. Inthe possession of the Artist. 








PraTeE 18. LORD D’ABERNON. (1916). Oil. Inthe possession of Lord D' Abernon. 





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CLAUDE JOHNSON, ESQ. (1917). Oil. In the possession of Claude Johnson, Esq. 








PLATE 21. THE MIDINETTE. (1917). Oil. In the possession of Claude Johnson, Esq. 








Pirate 22, MADAME DE GANDARILLAS AND CHILDREN. (1918). 


Owl. In the possession of Madame de Gandarillas. 








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PLATE 24. Deak te HONDAUGUSTINE BIRRELE: (1918). Oil. Ina private collection. 











PLATE 25%. MISS GREEN. (1920). Oil. Inthe possession of Charles Romer Williams, Esq. 








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PLATE 27. BY THE RIVER. (1922). Oil. In the possession of the Artist. 


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PVATE 31; 


SEU DING 


(1914). 


Water colour. 





In the possession of E. J. Hesslein, Esq., New York. 





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IPA RALLIES NG 


PLATE 32. 








Prate 33. THE ARTISTS WIRE. (rox5)- 


Water colour. Inthe possession of Claude Johnson, Esq. 








Poulter, Esq. 


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